Interactive Fiction: An Introduction to Scholarship

Electronic text in general is a volatile medium, where conventions often emerge and change before they can be translated successfully into print. Further, IF in particular has attracted only sporadic academic attention. Therefore, this bibliography includes useful information that can be gleaned from non-academic sources, including popular periodicals, fan tributes, and authors’ manifestos. Excellent theory, critical classification, technical advances, and textual analysis also spring from a devoted community of IF aficionados, mostly centering around the newsgroups “rec.arts.int-fiction” and “rec.games.int-fiction.” In reproducing quotations from the various sources, I have made no effort to standardize such things as whether computer game titles should be set off by quotations, by italics or underlining, or (as is common in non-scholarly sources) not at all. My annotations employ terms which may be unfamiliar to non-gamers; these include “PC” (player-character, the main character of a computer game, whose actions are controlled by a human being sitting at the controls) and “NPC” (a non-player character, or supporting actor, whose actions are controlled by the computer). —Dennis G. Jerz (2001) —Interactive Fiction: An Introduction to Scholarship(Minor HTML Editing))

While settling my thoughts to write something else, I decided to make some HTML edits that fixed some annoying problems that popped up when I transferred this site from its first home to its present home. I haven’t updated the content on this site since it was first published, though I have been keeping track of titles I need to add.